A network operator needs to invest a lot of manpower or money to conduct drive tests in the traditional network operation and maintenance. Moreover, a traditional drive test terminal may not reach indoors under some conditions. It is also difficult to record the traditional drive tests in some sudden network conditions. The minimization of drive tests (MDT) aims to reduce the work in the traditional drive tests conducted by an operator in building and subsequently maintaining the network, and to introduce a new user equipment (UE) function to tackle the problem that the traditional drive tests fail to solve. The UE is required by the MDT to record a network condition and a location at some time of the UE in a connected state and an idle state, and to report them to the network at the right time, thereby replacing part of the work in traditional drive tests.
The current MDT falls into two categories: immediate MDT and logged MDT. The immediate MDT is an MDT manner that a network performs MDT configurations on a UE according to the radio resource control (RRC), and the UE performs measurement in a connected state and reports a result immediately. The logged MDT is an MDT manner that a network side performs MDT configurations on the UE, and the UE transfers into an idle state to perform MDT measurement and log, and performs MDT log reporting after transferring into a connected state.
In the current Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard, the present trace function has been expanded to implement MDT measurement. A network management system configures relevant parameters of the MDT in a trace command, and sends them to an evolved NodeB (eNB) or a radio network controller (RNC). The foregoing relevant parameters of the MDT include a trace reference and a Trace control entity (TCE) IP address. After performing MDT measurement, the UE reports an MDT report to the eNB or the RNC, and the eNB or the RNC sends the MDT report to the TCE according to the TCE IP address to complete the drive tests. If the UE performs measurement in an idle state, the trace reference and the TCE IP address need to be configured for the UE by the network side through an air interface, so that when reporting the MDT report, the UE may carry the TCE IP address, thereby allowing the eNB or the RNC to find the corresponding TCE. In another technology, the eNB or the RNC configures the trace reference only for the UE. After the UE reports the trace report and the MDT report, the eNB or the RNC locally searches for the IP address of the corresponding TCE according to the trace reference. If the eNB or RNC fails to search for the IP address, it may ask a network manager (NM) entity for the TCE IP address.
However, direct configuration of the trace reference and the TCE IP address to the UE may cause safety issues because safety hazards may lurk in the operator's network once an illegal UE intercepts the TCE IP address, identifies the location of the TCE, and attacks the TCE of the operator directly. However, if the trace reference is only configured for the UE, the eNB or the RNC may not be able to determine which NM is the one that the eNB or the RNC should ask for the TCE IP address, thereby increasing the complexity of signaling interaction of the network and network processing.